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Tesla Bot will become a generalized substitute for human labor since the basis of any economy is labor. The robot will also reduce labor shortages due to a significant decrease in fertility, which will pose a problem in the future, Elon Musk said.

At the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) CEO Council Summit, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk discussed many important and interesting topics, one of which was Tesla Bot. The leader of the companies shared his concerns, which he has repeatedly expressed, that one of the biggest risks to civilization is a rapidly falling birth rate, which could ultimately lead to a shortage of labor.

“I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birthrate,” Musk said. “And yet, so many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control. It's completely the opposite. Please look at the numbers—if people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words," he continued.

On August 19, during Tesla AI Day, the company unveiled a humanoid robot—Tesla Bot. At the moment, the main problem that Tesla Bot has to solve is doing dangerous, repetitive, or boring work that people don't like to do, however, in the future, the scope of work may become much wider. Musk said that if there are not enough people, there will not be enough labor to support the economies of the countries, so Tesla Bot can help solve this problem.

“[Tesla Bot] has the potential to be a generalized substitute for human labor over time. The foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is essentially distilled labor... The fundamental constraint is labor. There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough. There are not enough people. I think one of the biggest risks for civilizations is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate.”

The humanoid robot will be 5 feet 8 inches (1.73 meters) tall, weigh 125 pounds (57 kg) and have a top speed of 5 mph (8 km / h). The company is developing a friendly robot, but knowing Musk's fears about their possible superiority over humans, Tesla is playing it extra safe. Tesla Bot will be specially designed to be slow and not too powerful, so that if something does go wrong, a human could still run away from it or overpower it. “We're setting such that it is, at a mechanical level, at a physical level, you can run away from it and most likely overpower it. Hopefully, that doesn’t ever happen, but you never know,” Musk said during Tesla AI Day.

The Tesla Bot will be made from lightweight materials and has the agility of a human thanks to 40 mechanical actuators: 12 in the arms, 12 in the hands, 12 in the legs, 2 in the torso, and 2 in the neck. It will also have 2 axis feet for balancing and force feedback sensing. It will have a screen on the head to display useful information. Tesla Bot will be equipped with 8 Autopilot cameras, FSD hardware, multi-cam video neural networks, neural network planning, auto-labeling, simulation and tools, and Dojo training. This means that it will be able to move independently in the environment without programming specific routes.

All this can make Tesla Bot an ideal workforce for many tasks, and in the future, support the economies of countries, protecting them from collapse.

© 2021, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.

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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter

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